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The New Patriotism 



SERMON 



BY 



REV. CHAS. L KLOSS. 



Delivered at the Public Memorial Service of Ransom Post, 

No. 131, Department of Missouri, Grand 

Army of the Republic. 



AT Webster Groves Congregational Church, 



May 26, 1 90 1 



The New Patriotism 



SERMON 



BY 



REV. CHAS. L. KLOSS. ^-T^^x 






Delivered at the Public Memorial Service of Ransom Post, 

No. 131, Department of Missouri, Grand 

Army of the Republic. 



AT Webster Groves Congregational Church, 

May 26, 1 90 1. 






D. of St. 
4F'03 



FIRST CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH. 

Webster Groves, Mo., March 22d, 1901, 
Mr. Charles W. Barstow, Commander Ransom Post G. A. R., 
St. Louis, Mo. 

My Dear Sir: — I want to extend to you, and through you to the 
Post of which you are the honored Commander, my most hearty and 
cordial invitation to celebrate the memorial of our country's gallant dead, 
in the First Congregational Church of Webster Groves. 

No one can look on the rapidly thinning ranks of the defenders of 
the Union with undimmed eye. The true epic of what your Comrades 
achieved in those four years of war has yet to be written. We are still 
too near events for clear historic judgment. Here and there are appre- 
ciative notes, striking and dramatic histories, but the full-orbed mean- 
ing of the struggle, the heroic defense, the countless sacrifices in their 
relation to the future of the Republic, that has yet to be written. Mean- 
while we can mingle our tears over the dead, and gather in our churches 
once a year to stir our memories and point anew the lessons of gratitude 
to them and to the author of all liberties. 

It is indeed a pleasure to offer you the hospitality of a church that 
has been dedicated to the maintenance of national and civic right ; a 
church that will ever keep burning, I trust, the fires of an exalted and 
spotless patriotism ; a church that will increasingly establish a comrade- 
ship in the realization and pursuit of the ideals of the Greater Republic. 
I have the honor to be, gentlemen. Sincerely yours, 

Chas. L. Kloss. 



St. Louis, June ist, 1901. 

Rev. Charles L. Kloss, Webster Groves. 

Dear Sir: — Will you kindly furnish for publication your magnificent 
sermon, entitled "The New Patriotism," delivered in the First Con- 
gregational Church at Webster Groves on the morning of Memorial 
Sunday, the 26th ultimo, upon which occasion Ransom Post in its or- 
ganized capacity was present on your ilivitation, as we feel it ought to 



be preserved in a permanent form, and many wish the pleasure and 
profit of reading it, who could not be present with us. 

Very sincerely yours, 



Charles W. Barstow. 


Jas. 0. Churchill 


RoBT. Buchanan. 


S. D. Webster.. 


Smith P. Galt. 


E. S. Cronk. 


Arthur P. Forbes. 


C. H. Davis. 


Dr. a. J. Steele. 


P. H. Clarke. 


Geo. W. Bailey. 


C. W. Hoermann. 


E. H. Sawyer. 


C. J. Collins. 


Delos R. Haynes. 


E. Magoon. 


J. F. Cluley. 


John Rademaker. 


M. M. Clark. 


Philip A. Miller. 


L. B. Ripley. 


Wm. Randolph. 


Byron W. McLain. 


M. R. Udell. 


F. A. Nagel. 



Webster Groves, June 6th, 1901. 

Messrs. Barstow, Buchanan, Galt, Forbes, Steele, Webster, 
Churchill, Bailey, Sawyer, Haynes, Cluley, Clark, Ripley, 
McLaIn and Others. 

Commander and Comrades of Ransom Post, St. Louis, Mo. 

Gentlemen: — The occasion of the coming of your Post to our 
church will ever be a beautiful spot in the memories of the church and 
congregation. It is seldom that a minister faces so inspiriting an au- 
dience. We felicitate ourselves to have had thus brought in upon us the 
lessons of patriotism, the cost of our liberties, and the wealth of sacrifice 
in our ancestry. 

I count it an honor to accede to your request to furnish for publi- 
cation the sermon delivered on that occasion. I herewith hand you the 
manuscript and take pleasure in dedicating the same to Ransom Post. 
I have the honor to be, gentlemen. Sincerely yours, 

• Chas. L. Kloss. 



THE NEW PATRIOTISM. 

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. 
—John 15 : 13. 

We are met here to-day, citizens and comrades of the Greater Re- 
public, to pay our tribute to our country's gallant dead ; to thank God 
anew for such a nation as ours, for such a history of achievement, such 
institutions, such a destiny; to stir our memories and refresh our hearts 
with the patriotism of the past. We are met here that we may become 
worthy sons and daughters of the defenders of the Union ; that we may 
increasingly appreciate our patrimony and lineage; and that we may get 
inspiration to meet present problems with the same heroism aiidTielf- 
sacrifice. 

As a boy, I used to think that the proper way to celebrate Memo- 
rial Day was to pay respects to Jefferson Davis and castigate the govern- 
ment for her leniency in the days of reconstruction. My idea of pa- 
triotism was similar to that of a good many people now, who think it is 
manifested solely by a stiff twist to the British lion's tail. I heard Ben 
Butler in a stump speech once say: "What England wants, I don't 
want; what England doesn't want, I want." The remark caught the 
galleries, but it was cheap patriotism. As a child of the war, nursed on 
the stirring tales of that epoch-making time by returning heroes, cradled 
by hands of patriotism, it was no wonder that, like many another, there 
was little love in my heart for anything South of Mason and Dixon's line. 

We are getting far enough away from those events for clearer and 
saner judgment. Surely it would be a prostitution of the day to glorify 
war, which the first commander of your Post justly characterized as 
" hell; " it would be a poor use of the day to stir up old-time passion 
and hatred. It is no mark of wisdom to depreciate the ability of an 
opponent, be it in debate or a fight. It takes nothing from the laurels 
of Grant or Sherman to extol the generalship and Christian character of 
Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. It detracts nothing from the 
splendid courage of the Union soldiers to characterize Pickett's charge 



— 6— 

at Gettysburg as one of the most daring and heroic in all history. 
When Mr. Beecher was making some historic speeches in England 
during the war, some man in the audience, at Liverpool I believe, 
asked him why the war was not ended in six months, as the North 
anticipated. Quick as a flash our great orator replied: "Because 
we are fighting Americans and not Englishmen." The Civil War was a 
war of brothers, Americans fighting Americans. God keep us from 
another fratricidal war! Across the bier of General Grant, who was 
first of all a man of peace, the North and South clasped hands, and 
within the past few years great advance has been made in the mingling 
together of the men who wore the blue and those who wore the gray. 
When Henry Grady appeared before the New England Society in Boston, 
a few years before his death, his theme was " The New South." The 
address was one of surpassing eloquence and rare insight, prophetic of 
the day when the New South was to give evidence of her loyalty to the 
flag and the Union. She has already done so, as the splendid services 
of General Fitzhugh Lee, Joe Wheeler, Hobson and of many a southern 
regiment in Cuba and the Philippines abundantly testify. The man who 
would foment strife between East or West, North or South, between labor 
and capital, or any section of our life, is the universal enemy. We have 
one flag, one constitution, one capital, one language, one country, one 
destiny, please God never more to be divided. 

The Civil War was costly in money and men, but was worth all it 
cost. The integrity of the Union, the maintenance of our institutions, 
are worth a much greater expenditure. The best things are the costliest. 
If there have been many crimes committed in the name of liberty, as 
Madame Roland suggests, there have also been the most wonderful 
chapters of heroism placed to her credit. It is a mistake to suppose 
that we are through with conflicts. The form only has changed. If it 
cost this nation a half a miflion of lives and billions of treasure to free 
the negro and to hold the nation indissoluble, it will cost vastly more in 
money and men to teach our growing populations and the other nations 
of the world our meaning of liberty, our interpretation of human right. 
Was not the costliest spectacle the world ever witnessed the scene on 
Calvary? Have we read aright its meaning? The world is to be re- 
deemed at great cost. The things that are spiritual, the heritage of 
every man born into the world, are not to be wrested and appropriated 
without shedding of blood. God spared not His Son, so great is the 



-7— 



cost. Does not a reverent reading of history indicate that before the 
world is redeemed, the last prodigal back in the Father's house, it is to 
involve the sacrifice of the sons of men? A person may give his thou- 
sands to some great charity, may endow a school or library, and people 
say that is generous. A young man gives up his hope of entering college, 
stays home and supports his parents, and you say that is noble. A gen- 
eral achieves a great victory, and applauding worlds says that is gallant. 
A man lays down his life for his country, and you say that is heroic. 
One, the matchless Master, gives his life even for his enemies, and that 
you must characterize as divine, and yet the one who comes near to 
this divine act is the one who holds his life to the defense of his country 
or friends. We are met here to-day to honor the memory of those boys 
in blue who did that very thing, who at their country's call took their 
lives in their hands and gave them a willing offering. To these men we 
bring our tribute of praise ; to these men who have kept to us our liber- 
ties and made us the first nation of the world we sing : 

" Saviors of our Republic, 
Heroes who wore the blue. 
We owe the peace that surrounds us 
And our nation's strength to you. 
We owe it to you that our banner, 
The fairest flag in the world, 
Is to-day unstained, unsullied. 
On the summer air unfurled." 

Abraham Lincoln, before his death, saw a conflict coming that would 
make the War of the Rebellion appear comparatively insignificant, and 
Wendell Phillips said that our cities would test our constitution more than 
slavery. The maladministration of our cities is the skeleton in our national 
closet. There are no cities of the Orient as bad as — Chicago. We may 
have a Declaration of Independence that is something more than a mass 
of glittering generalities, as some of our professors would have us believe ; 
we have a constitution which, as Mr. McKinley says, framed for eight 
millions of people, does good service for eighty, but we are far yet from 
securing to each man the full measure of life, liberty and happiness to 
which he is entitled. There is much to be done before the ultimate 
democracy has come. The call was never so loud as to-day for patriots 
who will live for their country — a living that may involve more sacrifice 
than dying for it. One kind of war there is where men march out with 
guns and flags and music, and shoot each other down. In the morning 



8 

the ambulances come and we count up the wounded and the slain, and 
we talk about the horrors of war. The other kind is the kind that with- 
holds subsistence from men, denies them opportunities, and the ambu- 
lance is required just as certainly. A man presses a button and orders 
a dozen factories closed, another captain of industry pockets our wheat 
or some other breadstuff and holds it till it has gone soaring, and thus 
levys a tax which the Czar of Russia could not do in his own land. A 
"Wizard of Finance" corners the oil, or coal, or iron, or the methods 
of transportation, and then proceeds to charge all the " traffic will bear," 
which is, being interpreted, all that the dear pe6ple will stand without 
revolution. The wars of greed, waged by the subtle forces of financial 
and political might, are the deadliest in history. Here a child dies, and 
there a mother or some poorly-nourished toiler throws up his hands in 
the night and goes to death from as mortal a wound as if shot by a bullet. 
The devastation wrought by untamed appetites and passion is annually 
greater than the ravages of an old-time plague. We have thirty murders 
a day, ten thousand a year — more lives lost in one year by homicide than 
killed in the wars in Cuba and the Philippines put together. We hunt 
people down with bloodhounds, and even burn them at the stake. The 
gambling spirit, the getting something for nothing, is the peculiar danger, 
the mania of the American people. It strikes at the tap root of all 
patriotism, honesty, manliness and loving service. It is no wonder that 
the messenger boys of Wall Street spend their spare time in playing 
craps, or that the young son of the Christian mother, who displays the 
trophies of her winnings in progressive euchre, should himself be one of 
the crack gamblers of the alley. The imposts levied by the saloon and 
brothel on young America are each year becoming more startling in their 
aggregate effect. We are familiar with the history of the infamous Allen 
law in our neighboring State of Illinois, and the threats of lynching by 
which the Chicago council was restrained from consummating a crime 
they were eager to do. We are familiar with the scandals of the Broad- 
way franchise in the New York Board of Aldermen, and how, but the 
other day, the council of Kansas City, Kansas, were prevented, on the 
last day of their term by threats of indignant citizens, and a liberal dis- 
play of rope nooses, from extending a railway franchise twenty-five years. 
The Legislature of Wisconsin overwhelmingly pledged to two great re- 
forms — primary reform, and the destruction of monopoly by equal taxa- 
tion for corporate and individual property — by judicious influence of the 



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lobby, repudiated those pledges the other day. The festering sores of 
municipal life, the rotten corruption, the boodling, the venality, the 
power of the boss, the defeats of justice, all these we know in all their 
sickening details. But worse than these is the dominance of the materi- 
alistic ideal and the bad citizenship of good citizens. That noble patriot, 
George William Curtis, a few years before his death said this: " While 
good men sit at home, not knowing that there is anything to be done, 
not caring to know, cultivating the feeling that politics are tiresome and 
dirty and politicians only vulgar bullies, half persuaded that a republic 
is the contemptible rule of the mob and secretly longing for a strong 
man and a splendid, vigorous despotism — then remember, it is not a 
government mastered by ignorance ; it is government betrayed by intelli- 
gence. It is not the victory of the slums; it is the surrender of the 
schools. It is not that bad men are politically shrewd ; it is that good 
men are political infidels and cowards." There are no proxies or sub- 
stitutes in the matter of citizenship. The great unwashed always vote — 
it pays. In Boston recently, in a contest that was hotly contested, not 
one-half the men of voting age were found at the polls, and two of the 
worst wards in this respect were those containing the wealthiest and 
most cultured people. Is it any wonder that with this array of dangers 
we have magazine writers who talk about our decadent patriotism? We 
have pessimists and croakers who already see in us the type of Rome's 
fall, the lowering clouds of a second French Revolution. 

Nevertheless — ^and hereby hangs a tale. Mr. Beecher was once asked 
by a woman the privilege of saying a few words in one of his meetings. 
Mr. Beecher courteously consented and the woman talked an hour and 
five minutes. When she was finally seated, Mr. Beecher arose and said 
simply: '•'•Nevertheless^ I believe in women talking in meeting." Not- 
withstanding this array of dangers, the New Patriotism has its eyes open, 
takes full account of all that menaces our country, and has estimated 
carefully by good scouts the full strength of the enemy. She knows 
something more than perils and dangers. She cannot be frightened. In 
a thousand battles in five great wars she has tested the spirit of the 
American people. The common people can be trusted. They will arise 
in their might and conquer the foes within, as valiantly as they fought 
the enemies without, and a " government of the people, and for the 
people shall not perish from the earth." 



—10- 



THE NEW PATRIOTISM HAS FAITH IN OUR INSTITUTIONS. 

Our fathers began by sowing plentifully white meeting houses and 
the little red school, and reaped a crop of Titanic patriots. We still have 
faith in those institutions as no other nation. As a result of the teaching 
of these twin institutions the sovereignty of man has gone like a tidal 
wave rolling irresistibly around the world. There are twenty republics 
in the new and seven in the old world. The Czar is in constant terror; 
the Kaiser tells his army to stand by him when the worst comes ; when 
the Emperor of Austria dies no one can tell what will become of his dual 
empire. There is uneasiness on every throne of Europe, and there are 
threats of a federation to resist the trade encroachments of the young 
giant of the West, born of yesterday. All this has come from a single 
conception — the sovereignty of man. Ideas are potential according to 
their backing. This one has come straight from the heart of the Infinite. 

If the citizen is sovereign, his rule must be based on intelligence, or 
else a republic becomes the worst form of despotism. The New Patriotism 
demands still greater faith in our schools and churches, our homes, our 
literature, and every intellectual lever of the people. It demands a 
thorough preparation for citizenship. The chief object of the State should 
be to teach how to become good citizens. Our boys are seldom able to 
indicate the trade or profession they mean to fill, but they all know they 
are to be citizens. The schooling of nearly ninety per cent, of our popu- 
lation is confined to the public schools. That being the case, we might 
teach them how Rome rose and fell, how to parse in Latin, and to trace 
out Greek roots ; but above all and first, let us teach American history, 
American statesmanship, American valor, American pluck, American 
ideals to American boys and girls. 

The Grand Army of the Republic has done much to inculcate 
these lessons of patriotism where most needed, in their flag presenta- 
tions. I shall never forget a scene at one of the largest ward schools 
in Kansas City on just such an occasion. The school with the teachers 
was assembled on the campus. In the foreground was a little com- 
pany of veterans. Old Glory had just been run up on an immense' 
flag-pole. Then out from the ranks stepped a bronzed and bearded 
soldier, with one empty coat sleeve, and in a few simple remarks told 
what that flag stood for, what it had cost, and what he hoped it would 
mean to the scholars of that school. The scene, the uniform, the simple 
badge, the empty sleeve, the flag, made an indelible impression on all 



—11— 

who witnessed it. If there are materialistic ideas, if there exists a feeble 
civic conscience, if there appears to be a growing disrespect for law, the 
philosophy of meeting these all lies in emphasis at the beginnings of our 
life. Prevention is better than cure. We have half a million criminals 
loose, a quarter of a million of habitual criminals, and a hundred thousand 
of them confined in fifty penitentiaries and seventeen thousand county 
jails that cost the nation over five hundred million dollars to erect. To 
take care of these criminals and get them behind bars cost us a yearly 
bill of six hundred million dollars. This yearly expenditure would 
employ ten thousand missionary teachers at six hundred dollars apiece 
for one hundred years. The philosophy to be insisted upon is that we 
use our schools and churches and preventive agencies more than our 
jails and Pinkertons. We need a clean water supply more than filters. 
It is better to have clean streets, to tear down filthy tenements, abolish 
the slums, and enforce sanitary law than to build expensive hospitals. .It 
is far better to kill diseased cows than to sterilize the milk. Seventy 
per cent, of the children of New York City die before they are two years 
old, and every tenth person a few years ago was a pauper. The best 
physician is the one who will keep us from getting sick ; the best lawyer 
the one who will keep us from ruinous lawsuits. There are many who 
think the danger to our country is from old world immigration. There 
is little if we can educate the children of the immigrant. The reason 
of our greatness is due to the fact that we are a composite nation. Our 
best families are dying out. The old towns of Massachusetts, where 
they used to send out big families, are now occupied by foreigners, who 
have the large families. Only forty-six per cent, of the old Bay State is 
native population. But Massachusetts is doing her best work in throwing 
open her educational resources to these sons and daughters of- other 
races and making Americans of them all. The reason why our American 
girl holds court of her own when she goes abroad, and makes the average 
European princess look like the fabled three dimes, is because she is such 
a glorious mixture. Into her mould has been poured all the beauty of 
the world. The New Patriotism demands that we give more time and 
attention to forming character than to reforming it; that we spend our 
money with a lavish hand on the preventive and educative agencies, 
those purifying and directing forces of our national life — the home, the 
church, the school, the press. 



—12— 

THE NEW PATRIOTISM HAS FAITH IN THE AMERICAN TYPE OF MANHOOD. 

The true glory of our country consists not in the height of her 
mountains, nor in the length of her rivers, not in the broad expanse of 
her lakes, not in the majesty of her forests nor in the fertility of her soil, 
not in her commerce, her tall buildings, her material resources, but in, 
her type of manhood. This is the glory of American citizenship and 
the hope of the future. Our cities are called " pocket editions of hell." 
People are often herded together like animals, and the horrors of the 
sweat shops and of how the "other half" lives, have been only too truly 
painted. Despite the much that would sicken us and make us lose 
heart, is that clinging belief in the American type of a man. It per- 
sists. W-e are talking less about our machines and more about our men. 
We are beginning to appraise a child as of more worth than a ware- 
house. 

" 111 fares the land, to hastening ills a prey. 
Where wealth accumulates and men decay." 

Money is not to be rated more than character. Human life must 
not continue to be cheap and dollars dear. This is the demand of the 
New Patriotism. Our nation is great not because of the exceptional 
men she has produced. Her greatness, the very perpetuity of her lib- 
erties, depends on the justice, the equality of opportunity she metes out 
to the weakest and poorest of her citizens. Rome sounded her own 
death knell when the patricians crushed the lower classes. You were 
familiar with the arguments used to buttress up slavery. It was charac- 
terized as "God-derived" and "God-acknowledged." But that blas- 
phemy on humanity was refuted. There are still some left, whose hire- 
lings discover biblical and economic reasons for the exploitation of the 
weak by the strong, but their number is growing beautifully less each 
day. 

" Measures, not men" used to be the rallying cry of American po- 
litical life. We are thinking now more of men, and echo the sentiment 
of that famous Senator who said: " I would prefer to have the laws 
made by Lucifer and executed by Gabriel, rather than to have them made 
by Gabriel and executed by Lucifer." It is not the platform or the 
party even that counts for much nowadays, but the men who make right- 
eousness effective in national life. No man conversant with political 
life but what notes with satisfaction the toning up of candidates in the 



-13- 



past fifteen years. The demand of the New Patriotism is that some of 
these financial giants should be content with several millions apiece and 
go to work for the state, dedicate that rare organizing genius to the 
good of all. Mr. Carnegie thinks that the man who dies rich dies dis- 
graced, and I hope indeed that he will die poor ; but some day we will 
amend Mr. Carnegie's doctrine and say that, as long as there is as much 
need in the world for the bread of life, that a man will be disgraced 
who gets as rich as Mr. Carnegie — like Agassiz so busied with service 
to his fellows that he had no time to make money. 

No proclamation can make the negro free. No constitution can of 
itself make people enlightened. No gift of universal suffrage can make 
men intelligent. It is the business of patriots to bridge the chasm be- 
tween black and white, the ignorant and the cultured, the weak and the 
strong. This can be done only by sacrificial lives, where the wealthy 
bear the burdens of the poor, and the strong those of the weak. These 
rifts between men and classes must not widen and deepen. They must 
be bridged, filled up, if we are to have the great open highway for human- 
ity to walk up to God — the ideal Christian Commonwealth. The great 
strong loving men must get down under the burdens of the Negro, the 
Pole, the Italian, the underfellow, and lift as a comrade. Co-operation 
is the watchword of the New Patriotism. No man can be hired to do 
our work. It was Lammennais who said: "I love my family more 
than myself, my village more than my family, my country more than my 
village, and mankind more than my country." That is a bit ideal, but 
it is the New Patriotism. Louis Pasteur said: "The true democracy 
is the one that gives to every individual the chance to accomplish his 
maximum of effort." This is the New Patriotism. What true men and 
women want, is not charity, not gratuities, but opportunity to fairly and 
worthily fight the battle of life. This is the New Patriotism. And it 
is one of the gratifying things to note that every branch of society is shot 
through with this doctrine. Men are studying with unparalleled eager- 
ness social and economic questions, and demanding that they square 
with the New Testament. They are ready to sacrifice for the new cru- 
sade, not to rescue a tomb, but to save their brothers — much more 
pleasing to the Christ. Thank God, there are statesmen who serve the 
State, noble men and women, who pay out their vitality day after day 
for their country. The American diplomat, the patriot schoolmaster 
and the missionary will redeem and Americanize our new possessions by 



—14— 

their lives of sacrifice. We shall yet have clean cities and a municipal 
life above reproach. The coming generation will answer the call of our 
poet of the "average man" — Sam Foss: 

Bring me men to match my mountains ; 

Bring me men to match my plains ; 
Men with empires in their purpose, 

And new eras in their brains. 
Bring me men to match my prairies, 

Men to match my inland seas. 
Men whose thought shall pave a highway 

Up to ampler destinies ; 
Pioneers to clear Thought's marshlands, 

And to cleanse old Error's fen ; 
Bring me men to match my mountains — 
Bring me men ! 

Bring me men to match my forests, 

Strong to fight the storm and blast, 
Branching toward the skyey future. 

Rooted in the fertile past. 
Bring me men to match my valleys, 

Tolerant of sun and snow. 
Men within whose fruitful purpose 

Time's consummate blooms shall grow. 
Men to tame the tigerish instincts 

Of the lair and cave and den. 
Cleanse the dragon slime of Nature — 
Bring me men ! 

Bring me men to match my rivers. 

Continent cleavers, flowing free. 
Drawn by the eternal madness 

To be mingled with the sea ; 
Men of oceanic impulse, 

Men whose moral currents sweep 
Toward the wide-infolding ocean 

Of an undiscovered deep ; 
Men who feel the strong pulsation 

Of the Central Sea, and then 
Time their currents to its earth throb — 
Bring me men ! 

What is it that fires the national heart and makes every man of us 
want to live to see the America of a hundred or even fifty years from 



—15— 

now? We have drunk of the wine of hope and have heard the tramp of 
the miUions of sacrificial ones who shall redeem our land. It was the 
new Republic that Sam Adams and Patrick Henry plead for, that Warren 
and Washington fought for. It was the nation that was to be that 
Meade's army saved from death on the heights of Gettysburg. It was 
the future great republic that Abraham Lincoln saw with prophetic eye 
and blessed with his heroic life and martyr's death. Somehow the 
American has clutched to himself the belief that this is peculiarly God's 
country, and that in this hemisphere is to be wrought out the true 
Christian State, the Kingdom of God on earth. 

" Our hearts, our hopes are all with thee, 

Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears. 
Our faith triumphant o'er our fears, 
Are all with thee, are all with thee." 

If we were asked what was the greatest year of General Grant's life, 
we might say the year that saw the end of the war when General Lee 
surrendered, the year he was chosen president, or when he came back 
from his triumph around the world. It was none of these. In all the 
years of brilliant public achievement there is nothing to compare with 
the self-denial and grim fortitude of the last year of his life. Here we 
see true moral greatness. Twenty-one days before his death, after he 
had completed his task of writing his memoirs to wipe his name free 
from debt, he wrote on a tablet: " If it is within God's providence that 
I should go now, I am ready to obey His call without a murmur." 
Many instances of such like heroism found in the common life of to-day 
make us believe we are equal to any crisis. Let the danger be but felt 
and clearly discerned and we come together as one man. We have 
been suckled on self-sacrifice. It is in our blood. It is the scarlet 
thread running through our history. Not a day passes but what some 
new example is heralded across the continent. But yesterday, two 
colored men were cleaning a boiler into which steam was accident- 
ally admitted while they were at work. One of them jumped for the 
ladder and might have escaped ; but he voluntarily stood aside and 
shouted: *•' You go first, Jim; you are married." Jim ran up the lad- 
der which only one could use at a time, and Phelps waited till the steam 
had cooked his flesh. Lie lived two hours in the greatest agony. 
William Phelps was a common man and despised " nigger," but he was 



-16- 



one who laid down his life for his friend — ' ' and greater love hath no 
man than this." Time would fail to tell the acts of the modern apostles 
of the faith, acts attested by a joyful sacrifice of their lives. 

As we look into your faces, soldiers and patriots of the Grand Army 
of the Republic, as we read this roll of your dead, we are admonished 
that the day is rapidly approaching when you, too, will be mustered out. 
A short time before Benjamin Harrison's death, his former law partner^ 
William Fishback, died, and the lawyers of Indianapolis met in the 
federal court room to take suitable action. General Harrison's remarks 
were brief and touching. In closing, he said: "In the dead of night, 
lately, gentlemen of the bar, my little daughter came to me with deep 
earnestness and said, ' Papa, in the big darkness of the night, I wake up 
and want to touch you. If I don't, I feel lonely.' " The general paused 
and then continued, " I put out my hand to touch my old friend; he is 
gone, and I am lonely." 

Men of the Grand Army of the Republic, soon your sons and 
daughters, your friends, the nation, will stretch out hands to touch you, 
and you will have been mustered out, and we will be lonely. May God 
grant to you His peace in the closing years of your life. May those 
years be your happiest and best, and may you be comforted in seeing 
the generation of young America filled with the New Patriotism, intelli- 
gently alert to the needs of the hour, and men ready to give themselves 
as unselfishly to fight the battles of to-day as you did those of yesterday. 



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